I wonder how people defined “gross” back then.
They had no concept of bacteria or modern sanitation. They lived in a world full.of horse shit, which they stepped in, and smelled, all the time.
My guess is that they reacted to feces the same way that we react to mud. Sure, it’s ugly, but it’s not disgusting. You just wipe it off and ignore it.
Is my guess reasonable?
Depending exactly where you were, you may have plastered your hovel with cow, horse or sheep dung to fill the gaps in the stone and wattles, bleached clothes in urine, collected more urine to sell to fullers and tanners, or mixed your own shit with the soil in the garden for your vegetables. Your water was perhaps collected just down the hill from there, and was so chewy that a spoon could stand upright.
That’s a buffet of different historically attested things, but you’re basically right - if you have a worldview that allies illness with humours out of kilter, sin and God’s wrath, then linking shit (yours and others’) and illness is just crazy talk. God or his agents on Earth will be having a word with you shortly about your doubts.
Part of the western civilisation project over the past three centuries has been to separate humans from having to engage with their precious bodily fluids and fewmets as best as possible, and we are somewhere near the finish line on this now. This journey began before germy thinking became a useful explanation, but once the link from pump handles to cholera was established in 1854, there was no going back [although I think there is little that would give a modern vaccine denialist pause for more conspiracism when cholera blasts through US urban centres in 2025-29].
[For those who are visually inclined, the Python-adjacent film Jabberwocky does a fair job of reminding us just how much shit there was in peoples’ daily orbit.]
Knew someone once whose job was searching through human fecal samples for parasites, as part of some scientific study. Reportedly it paid 3x all the other comparable lab jobs, and still had trouble being filled.
Feces has always been gross. The smell is off putting.
Sure, people of the past had to deal with it in ways that we in the modern world do not. But when my son was a toddler learning to potty train by using the plastic toilet, which required me to physically remove the poop and then clean it, it didn’t somehow become less gross. So, it was a chore they had to tolerate, but I can’t believe that they equated shit with just dirt.
I’m guessing that much of our general understanding of the role has been muddied by the personal experiences of Henry VIII, as he ended up really obese and had mobility issues, so he probably did need somebody to directly clean him.
Then again, I may just be naive
Some years ago I was entranced by Charles Panati’s two books about ‘the beginnings’ and ‘extraordinary endings of practically everything and everyone’. I think in the endings book, there was a chapter about a French king who got daily enemas and never moved his bowels of his own accord. I don’t know the reasoning, but he had people doing his dirty work for him. So the Groom of the Stool job seems to feet right into this mindset. A great honor!
US Presidents have the same protocol.
Yep…
Even Bush’s crap is classified top secret. According to our Austrian sources, Austrian newspapers are currently abuzz with special security details of George W. Bush’s recent trip to Vienna. Although the heavy-handed Gestapo-like security measures meted out to Viennese home owners, business proprietors, and pedestrians by US Secret Service agents and local police before and during Bush’s visit received widespread Austrian media attention, it was White House ‘toilet security’ (TOILSEC), which has Austrians talking the most.
I didn’t have the video, but that’s where post #17 comes from.
Recall that in The Man Who Would Be King they build an army following from people whose grievance against the next village upstream is they piss in their river.
There was a French(?) castle where the invaders got in by climbing up the toilet drain. Traditionally, people could just stick their butt over the battlements- but that left a skid-mark down the side of the outer wall, so they’d build a shaft around the designated battement, open at the bottom. Some entrprising invader used that narrow shaft as a way to climb the battlements unseen. (They couldn’t see the enemy coming, but presumably when they got in, they could tell where the enemy were…)
What I found interesting about the castles and palaces, was that before the idea of corridors (why waste construction effort on a room that isn’t going to be occupied for something?) each room led to the next, until they ended in the King’s bedchamber. Each room was successively more private, and occupied by succesively more presigious and reliable individuals whose job was to stop invaders and assassins before they could reach the king.
Plus, the to group advising the leader, today (now the prime minister), is still called the “privy council”; i assume because they had access to his most “privy” places in both senses.
If you visit Dogo Onsen in Matsuyama they have a special toilet built for the Emperor’s exclusive use in the 1920s. Picture here at the bottom under “Okawaya”: https://dogo.jp/en/yushinden_room.php " there remains to be a single use of this priceless lavatory."
Not visible in the picture, it is a hole in the floor with clean sand in the bottom. Per the tour guides it was so his doctors could look at his output to monitor his health.
In The Madness of King George IIRC the royal doctors are shown examining his stool while ignoring the one who complained that his urine turned blue as an indicator of his madness spells…
This has been my understanding, as gleaned from five seasons of Horrible Histories.
I’m mostly kidding, but it would seem human waste was everywhere and had several practical uses.
I also remember the episode that talked about guests defecating all over Whitehall. If people were appalled, they sure didn’t act like it and the king apparently allowed it.
I tried watching Horrible Histories (which is, or was, on one of the US streaming services) but much of it was too gross.
Right? Maybe that’s why it’s so popular / good teaching tool for children. Kids love gross and old England seems to have been very disgusting.
In 16th Century England, wiping the king’s ass was probably the least disgusting, dangerous, grueling, humiliating, or demeaning job a commoner could have.
These guys were not commoners.
What’s the logic ?
Obviously dictators who intend to rule forever want to hide any sign of medical weakness*.
But Bush was a normal president who played by the rules. He was elected for a 4 year term. There are very few medical problems that would be diagnosable by urine/stool tests which would affect his capacity to govern during those 4 years.
Even if the KGB sampled and examined Bush’s waste, what was the CIA afraid of revealing?
*(and , yes, I include Trump. Remember his mysterious helicopter evacuation from the White House to the hospital.)
In his book Good to Eat (AKA The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig anthropologist Marvin Harris, expounding on the many advantages of live cows (rather than slaughtering them and eating them in India) , pointed out that cow dung was widely used as a building material, not only for filling in cracks in walls, but also for creating a sort of pseudo-concrete floor that was hard, durable, and easy to sweep. It was also perfect for fuel, providing a low, long-burning fire that allowed long-term cooking, like a low-tech CrockPot. He implies that the odor is not too awful or severe, although that’s not my experience from visiting farms as a kid.
I’m a country kid, and there’s a big difference between the smells of dung from plant eaters (stinky, but not icky) and omnivores. Try stepping into a cow or horse stable, and compare it to a pig stable (gah!).